Originally Posted by
njkayaker
Many magazines are targeted to enthusiastic/excited newcomers. They tend to recycle topics.
This.
And it's true of a lot of sports mags (Backpacker, etc.). Although I always thought that "Buycycling" was one of the worst in terms of articles being thinly veiled ads.
But having said that, when I first thought of myself as a biker (as opposed to just riding bikes) in the 80's, I read it quite a bit; it did contain a lot of basic information that it was useful to know. Particularly about mountain bikes and indexed shifting, both of which were becoming popular around that time, and neither of which I knew much about.
But once you've biked for a while and developed certain preferences, you'll probably find that you've outgrown the magazine.